HugePoker

Pete sent me a text message this afternoon informing me that the daily tournament at Roxy’s casino in West Seattle tonight was the extra-special $110 buyin tournament that happens every other Tuesday (on all other nights it’s a $30 event). I decided that made it worth the drive – I hadn’t played a tournament in an actual cardroom since the World Series.

So I hopped in my car and drove over there and won the thing. I think there were 35 players, and they only paid the top 4, with $1360 for first place. The structure of the tournament is pretty good at the start (you start with a lot of chips relative to the blinds) but because the blinds double every level it pretty quickly becomes what we call in the trade “an all-in fest”, ie everyone’s stack is so short that their only choice is to raise all-in or fold. There was a point at the final table when I turned to Pete and said “I’m the chip leader and I have six big blinds” (for comparison, I just looked at several online tournaments on Pokerstars and the chip leaders at most of the final tables have something like 50 big blinds). So players usually moan about it when this happens, and they say things like “well it’s just a crapshoot now”, or “when the blinds get this high it takes all the skill out of it”. I used to say those things too, and when you’re playing against a bunch of people who more or less know what they’re doing it’s more or less true … but … OH MY GOD, there was some ***bad*** play at that final table. The only thing I had to do was decide whether I should shove all my chips in on EVERY hand, or maybe every other hand to give myself a shred of credibility. When the blinds were 3000-6000 there was an all-in raise, it was folded around to the big blind who had 2000 behind (meaning he had 8000 at the start of the hand but 6000 was already posted as his big blind) … he thought about it for a bit and then folded. There was 17,000 in the pot, and all he had to do to have a shot at it was to throw in 2,000 chips and turn over his cards (getting 8.5:1 on his money) and even if the raiser had showed him a pair of Aces he would have been getting proper odds to call the bet with any two cards. There was absolutely no need for him to look at his cards in that spot – he just had to throw his chips in and pray. No-one at the table (excepting me and Pete - we shared a glance that was something like a mime coughing up a hairball) seemed to think that was odd in the least. So I just shoved and shoved and shoved and they mostly folded and occasionally they called or I called and they lost.

Pete actually got his money in good against me, with A-6 against … I can’t even remember what I had, K-10 or something like that, but he didn’t have enough chips to make me fold, and I wasn’t THAT much of an underdog, and I caught a King to send him out in 5th place, sort of on the bubble but we had all agreed to take $100 out of the prize pool so that 5th place would get their money back. And we had agreed to a 10% action swap, so I got 10% of his $100 and he got 10% of my $1285 (my haul after the tip for the dealers and the reduction for 5th place), so he made some money on the event. Still, busting him out when he had the best hand was kind of a nasty way to thank him for alerting me to the tournament - he even bought in for me in case I didn’t get there before the tournament filled up - what a rotten bastard I am. Sorry Pete.

At one point I had so many chips that the players were discussing just letting me have first prize money and splitting the rest of the prize money evenly. Of course I would have taken the deal (as a matter of fiduciary responsibility to myself), but I’m sort of glad that one guy had the sense or the stones not to accept it - it would have been pretty pathetic of them to roll over that easily, sort of like a plea-bargaining sassion in which the defense attorney says “OK, how about this: we consent to a verdict of first-degree murder and a sentence of death, and you agree to not put us through the silly hassle of a trial - sound good?”.

In addition to the cash, I received a commemorative Liberty Silver Dollar with 1 troy oz of fine silver. I will cherish it forever.

I won another tournament a few days ago (online). It was a freeroll tournament (meaning I didn’t pay to enter but rather was given a seat as part of a promotion or rewards program). There were 45 players in that and first prize was only $800, so hardly worth mentioning. It’s great to win two tournaments in the span of a few days, but it’s unfortunate that the two I won are probably the tournaments with the absolute lowest first prizes of any tournaments I’ve played in a few months.

Whining aside, as the title of this post implies, it is always great to win a live tournament. There’s something you just can’t get online … I think Conan the Barbarian (ie Arnold Schwartzenegger) said it best when asked to define happiness: “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” You definitely don’t get that online.

I’ve been meaning to write up some stories from Vegas, both poker hand stories and otherwise, and I just haven’t gotten around to it. I am currently trying to scheme up a European tour – there are major tournaments this fall in Paris, Baden, Dublin and Amsterdam, and I’d love to figure out a way to make it to some or all of them. I’ll keep you posted…

-huge